Two interviews with and a book by Mehdi Hasan, about how to argue, and win arguments, using emotional connections over facts and figures, critical thinking skills, with the difficulty in conducting “good-faith” arguments with the right. How some victims of right-wing media are lost. With references to the Gish Gallop, and John Stuart Mills.
Salon, Dean Obeidallah, 28 Feb 2023: MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan: You need “rhetorical judo” to challenge the far right, subtitled “Here’s what Hasan says too many left-liberal arguments fail to grasp: ‘We are emotional creatures, not logical'”
This is consistent with the conclusions of much modern psychology (Kahneman, Haidt, Shermer, et al): humans are intuitive lawyers, not intuitive rationalists. People reach conclusions on emotional grounds, and then marshal arguments and facts (if any) to justify those conclusions, as lawyers do.
Coincidentally, Mehdi Hasan (he’s on MSNBC but I don’t watch that service and had not heard of him until this week) was interviewed on the local NPR radio station this morning.
KQED, Mina Kim, 2 Mar 2023: Mehdi Hasan Wants You to ‘Win Every Argument’
I was skeptical when I saw the Salon item linked here, because life shouldn’t be about simply winning arguments, it should be about identifying the truth. (This is why I’ve long been skeptical of formal debates, and debating teams in high school.) But Hasan’s theme isn’t quite as literal as what he says; he wants people to engage in “good-faith” arguments and debates into order to challenge claims made without evidence, or despite evidence.
And he has a new book: Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking
From Salon, which has its interview here on YouTube.
What Hasan advocates is essentially about teaching people critical thinking skills. This is vital in today’s America when it comes to assessing the veracity of claims made by both dishonest politicians and media outlets, especially given the way right-wing outlets like Fox News knowingly peddled misinformation about the 2020 election.
Both in Salon and in the KQED interview he makes a point about the difficulty of arguing with the right.
[Obeidallah:] There’s one unique thing we’re living through right now. People call into my radio show from the right, and it’s not like they’re lying. They actually think what they “know” are facts, and they’re not facts. I’ve learned not to get mad at them because they’ve been misled. They literally think, “Well, I was told this by Fox News,” or “I read this at the Daily Caller.” These right-wing publications have misled these good people. How do you debate people when they have their own set of facts and it’s not malicious?
[Hasan:] I spend a lot of time in the book trying to address this point because I’m frustrated as much as you are. I said after Donald Trump won in 2016 to a colleague of mine, I was at Al Jazeera English, let’s just jack it all in. Let’s just be accountants, not that there’s anything wrong with being an accountant. But what is the point of doing what we do if there are tens of millions of people out there who just believe this nonsense? And again in 2020, with QAnon and the big lie and all the denialism.
I would say two things, and I address this in a couple of chapters in the book. There’s a chapter in the book called “Beware the Gish Galloper.” It references this idea of people on the right who push misinformation deliberately. Not the people you were talking about. I’ll come to the people you’re talking about in a moment, the kind of people who believe it. I’m talking about the pushers of misinformation, the bad-faith merchants, the BS artists, the con men. How do you deal with people like that? Because they’re not arguing in good faith, and simply reciting a bunch of statistics to them or bringing your receipts is not going to work.
He makes the point that arguing isn’t about changing someone’s mind; it’s about persuading the audience of neutrals who are watching. And:
Don’t budge when they try and run over you with a torrent of bullshit. And pick your battles. When these people come at you with nonsense, they throw 100 lies at you, 100 conspiracy theories. You can’t bat them all away. Don’t even bother trying. Pick the most absurd one, take that one apart to expose the entire nonsensical strategy.
The KQED interviewer was explicit about citing Donald Trump and Steven Bannon as people who do this kind of thing.
But then there’s the people who believe the Gish gallop, the people, as you say, who are not arguing maliciously but believe this stuff. I think with them you have to find a bond if you’re going to try and get through to them. Personally, I think a lot of these people are lost, sadly. Sorry to sound so pessimistic, but I do believe a lot of these people are lost.
The interviewer gives an example of one.
I had a listener call my show, and I remember this vividly. He calls up and says, “Biden has open borders.” And I go, “What do you mean, open borders?” He goes, “There’s no border control.” I say, “So no one is working at those little tollbooths? They’ve all gone home? They’re sitting home watching TV?” There’s this long pause. He goes, “You shut up.” That was his answer to me, because no one had offered a real-life rebuttal. He’s just sitting there with his friends going, “It’s open border.”
And then a key point: facts and figures don’t work. You have to tell stories, reach people on a personal level. (Cue McRaney’s latest book.) Not that you shouldn’t have facts and figures to back you up: “bring your receipts” he says.
And he criticizes Democrats for thinking everyone is sitting at home with a rational calculator. The Democratic presidential candidates who lost (Gore, Kerry, Hillary Clinton) were dry policy-wonkers; those who won, Bill Clinton, Obama, and Biden, have an authenticity that connects with people.
Hasan approves of debates, but wants people to learn critical thinking, not to simply accept whatever they see on social media. “We have a lot of people today who just don’t understand how the media works: what is a reliable source, what isn’t a reliable source.” How the world works.
A couple more quotes:
Is there one thing that really is your touchstone when you’re getting ready for a debate?
Yes. It’s John Stuart Mill’s advice in “On Liberty,” which is that you cannot know your own side of the argument without knowing the other side of the argument. The problem we have is we live in a world of confirmation bias. I mentioned earlier to surround yourself with positive people, but don’t just surround yourself with people who agree with you.
I, for one, have never de-friended anyone on Facebook because I was upset with something they said. I see that many of my Facebook friends have done so; in fact, my brother did, to me.
Ad hominem attacks get a bad rap. They’re actually vital to undermining the credibility of your opponent. This goes back to Aristotle again. He called it ethos.
Finally, I believe it was in the KQED interview (with no transcript yet available) where Hasan drilled in on one point: focus on one lie amidst all the others. “You didn’t answer the question.” Keep the focus. Another point: sometimes instead of arguing, it would be enough to, say, ask Donald Trump, “What does NATO stand for?” and see him fumble.
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(The Gish of “Gish gallop” is Duane Gish, a famous creationist who spoke very fast so this his debaters could not keep up with him.)
